Saturday, February 16, 2013

The beauty of the three sentence logline is its structure: one sentence each for the beginning, middle and end of your novel. I can whittle almost any plot down to a single sentence, but selling a project is not always just about how few words you can use to sum up the plot.

Here's the strongest one sentence logline for The Steampunk Novel: A young magic-handler desperate to find
her Da confronts conspiracy, murder and forbidden magic under the
streets of 1888 London.
It's good. It covers the plot. It identifies the protagonist, her goal and the obstacles she faces. All in all, it does exactly what it's supposed to do. But, when I entered The Bakers Dozen Agent Auction in November I felt like I needed something that touched on the specifics of the story.

This is what I came up with: Magic-handler
Keira Fennel's search for her father intersects with shape-shifter
Lowen McCrae's hunt for a murderer in the alleys of 1888 London. When
they uncover a plot to construct a mechanical heart from stolen
flesh, Keira's skill with gears and magic makes her the target of the
otherworldly villain. She's forced to participate in the experiment
or lose both Lowen and her father.

This version is also good. It covers the plot. It identifies the protagonist, her goals and the obstacles she faces. It also provides details that highlight the uniqeness of the story and the final conflict.

Is it better than the shorter version? No. Probably not. But it is capable of serving a different function. Because of the added length it is not just a logline, it's also a very short synopsis and there are times when that property will be more important than the brevity of the shorter version.

Just like a synopsis (which should have 1-2 page and 4-10 page versions) there's no harm in having loglines of different lengths one very short one to sell the heart of your story and one slightly longer one that covers the plot arc from beginning to end. If anything, identifying the guts of each act of the novel is helpful in writing both the query letter and the normal length synopsis.

So. What are the three acts of your novel? When you distill them into a single sentence each, what does it look like?

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Last week I went through some of my "archived" stories. Mostly bits and pieces of novels that I started and then shelved during a long case of Shiny-New-Idea-itis. (Seriously. It was almost ten years of moving from one project to the next and not finishing any of them. Blech. I have developed a little more discipline since then. But I still have a massive back-log of Unfinisheds clamoring for attention.)

A couple of things immediately stood out to me.

Firstly, my writing up until about three years ago... kind of sucked. And there isn't some magic point after which my stuff doesn't suck, but there's definitely a point at which I started focusing on writing better. I found a lot of earlier stuff written in squashy Omni. And some of it is not bad (for Omni which I still suck at), but most of it is just... squashy. After I began to focus on writing only one character's POV per chapter there is a vast improvement. (And this isn't to say that there is anything wrong with Omni, but I don't do it very well. At all.) And my characters got a little more personality. Not that they didn't have flaws before, but there's more nuance to the more recent characters. Some of them have downright unlikeable traits. (Like my Fey detective who compares his college-educated female partner to a stripper. Or the Marine Sergeant who is a not only a chauvinist but also a bigot through and through.)

I know why this shift in quality happened.
I started analyzing my work. I began looking for things to improve. I began writing for more than just fun. (And again, nothing wrong with writing for fun, but for me personally, it didn't spur me to grow as a writing because the only person I had to please was myself. And that used to be easy.)

Secondly, despite the lack of skill in the writing, the ideas were sound. And this, is one reason why I used to have so much trouble finishing things - I didn't have the skill to tell the story. Deep down I knew (and still know) that I'm not quite ready for the epic cyber-pagan novel I first drafted when I was fifteen. It has a scope and language that is just a touch beyond me. One of these days I'll sit down to try it again and it will flow, but for now... I'm just not ready for it. But the idea... that's been solid since the beginning which makes me think that maybe there are no bad ideas, just poorly executed ones.

I remember a few years back, when I was still in college so maybe a decade ago, I ran into a fellow in an online community who was developing an idea for a Sci-Fi story. He had a planet that was always dark on one side and always light on the other. And there was a giant bridge connecting the planet with it's orbiting moon. That, in and of itself, is a bit of a stretch but it could be feasible. HOWEVER, he wanted it to be Earth. Not just a version of Earth, but OUR EARTH. And his explanation for why one side was always day and the other always night? "The moon stopped orbitating [sic] around the Earth."

I tried to explain that the moon's orbit has nothing to do with why we have day and night on all sides of Earth. He was offended. AND he accused me of being the opposite of a "creative". He said I was *gasp* "AN EDITOR."

After I stopped laughing, I realized that he had a prime example of a poorly executed idea. Because he wanted to make it "real", but he A) didn't know enough about the subject matter and B) wasn't willing to adapt his premise.

But I digress. The point here is that even the ideas I had a memory of being awful were not so bad when I looked at them again. They do, however, need some retooling. Not bad ideas, just poorly executed. Even the stuff from my early years that I really want to print out just so I can set it on fire is not "bad" it just needs better words to flesh it out.

And that, quite frankly, is just a question of practice. In fact, that's a large part of what I do when I write - get rid of the bad words in a story and replace them with good ones. Because the idea is sound. I think, really and truly, most of them are. Maybe even all of them are. I just have to find the right words.

Of Lips and Tongue

Delaney Green is one of them that don't burn. Possessed of the Touch, she's been twisting the future like a piece of string, but is it enough to save the man she loves?

Of Shade and Soul

Delaney Green might be dead, but she don't mean to stay that way. As she searches for a way back to the realm of the living, and the man she lay down flesh and bone for, Percival Cox and his team investigate a series of deaths and stolen souls. But Percy is not the man he used to be. If Del can't find a way to stop him from waking his past, he could destroy everything, including himself.

Of Flesh and Bone

Delaney Green may have found her way back to the living, but her new body isn't going to last. Without magic, and still separated from Percy, she is forced to rely on the tangled memory of what might be to find a way to reclaim her bones. With the help of an old ally, and the reluctant assistance of new enemies, Del must take the final steps down a long road home.

For Kindle

The Weather's Always Fine in Paradise

Dust

Half-Fae cop, Jonas Flannery has lost enough partners in his years on the job - to drugs, to corruption, to the monsters that prowl the streets. When his current partner, Lola Rodriguez, is whammied by a dying pixie queen, he finds himself in a race against time to find the drug producing Dust farm, free the other Corlun, and save Lola before the magic breaks her mind.

Legacy

When a skin-changer looking for passage to Lake Ponchartrain collapses at her feet, Willa Arch finds herself drawn into a conflict between the iron-willed Queen Elsbett of Brittania and Queen of the Dead, Marie Laveau. But survival means coming face to face with Willa's own deadly legacy of fur and teeth.

In the Cool of the Day

Miriam's aunts are determined to get everything that's coming to them. With Gran on her deathbed and a storm on the horizon, they are all about to learn that true inheritance is more than things.

The Collections Agent

Milton Jones collects the things people can no longer afford to keep. Magic. Skills. Souls. And, sometimes, a heart.

About Me

A.G. Carpenter writes fiction of (and for) all sorts. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Abyss & Apex, Stupefying Stories and "Beast Within 4: Gears & Growls". She prefers Die Hard to When Harry Met Sally and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly over Animal House. Her favorite color is black. Repped by Bob Mecoy.